Wall Street Journal iPad Edition: $18 Per-Month

The Wall Street Journal has all but announced the price of its iPad edition: $18 per month. That compares to the official print-edition price of $29-per-month, or $10 if you buy a print subscription through a reseller. The WSJ article quotes people at the WSJ who are “familiar with the situation”, so you can take it as a reliable report.

Is this too much? For the WSJ, perhaps not, as it is one of the only papers people already pay to read online. But for papers (and magazines like Wired), which make their entire content available free, any amount above a few bucks a month might be too much. It’s not even like you are getting an ad-free version. The WSJ has signed up some big names, including Coca-Cola and FedEx, for $400,000 (over three months).

The publishers seem to be banking on multimedia to entice people, packaging movies and sound along with the pictures and text. I’m skeptical. This didn’t work for the CD-ROM, nor with the web. I certainly don’t want to have to watch a video-clip to get part of an otherwise text-only story. Also, shouldn’t these guys be cutting production costs? Shooting video is expensive. It also takes up a lot of space. There’s no way I would want top pull down a multi-gigabyte app to my 16GB iPad.

From a gadget point-of-view, this seems to be all wrong. The WSJ will probably get away with it as executives read their iPads and work from the beach, but trying to charge people for what they currently get free, and will still be able to get free, looks like a bad idea.